Play Dead (3 page)

‘I'll think about evenings,' she said. ‘Of course I could do it, but you see … well, I love looking after Toby, and it came at the right time for me, but now I'm not sure it's been really good for me. It's sort of narrowing. And ageing. I like the nannies and young mums, and they've been very nice to me, but they have such limited ideas—I know that sounds snobbish, and there's all sorts of things they know and I don't, but … and they don't mean to, but they treat me sometimes as if I was a hundred and twenty. I'm going to be fifty in a couple of weeks. If I'd got a proper job it would be at least ten years till I retired. I refuse to let myself become just a granny, and nothing else any more. I need more in my life than baby-minding and bridge evenings and Radio 3. For a start I'm going to get myself a real job, and some new friends.'

‘You've stopped seeing Alex?'

‘Some time ago. You might as well know, I suppose. I gave him the push. I realised I was never more than a bit on the side for him. He kept telling me his marriage was dead, but really he wanted it still. It wasn't just that he hadn't got the guts to leave his wife—he was comfortable with her, used to her. At first he used to pretend, quite pleasantly, but then he stopped bothering. I wasn't having that.'

‘Poor Poppy.'

‘Toby got me on the rebound, you might say. But now …'

‘What sort of a job, though?'

‘I'm not unemployable, whatever you may think. First I'm going to go to evening classes and get my German back—I used to be pretty good—and I'll think about learning a third language …

‘Much better learn how to use a word processor.'

‘Oh, well … But just with good German I ought to be able to find something. If I start getting myself together when the courses start—just a few weeks now—I should be able to aim for a real job about this time next year. But I'm going to need regular evenings, you see … It's none of my business, darling, but when I took Toby on you were talking about starting another baby around now.'

Janet laughed and stretched and shook her wild hair.

‘Can't you see me on the hustings?' she said. ‘Size of a double-decker bus. Remember what I was like with Toby? Vote earth mother for a better Britain!'

‘I wonder how Mrs Capstone would counter that. I suppose there's lots of different kinds of earth mother. Some of them are pretty sinister.'

‘Cruella de Ethelden. She's a Pro-lifer. She'd manage to imply that by rushing round canvassing I was trying to induce an abortion. How long has her kid been coming to the play centre?'

‘This was the first time. The nanny said Deborah hadn't been getting on with the children at Holland Park, so she told her to try ours.'

‘Fat chance. She doesn't want people saying she sends her kid out of the constituency to play with a nobbier lot.'

‘Do you really think so? If Deborah had been happy there?'

‘That sort of woman does absolutely nothing that isn't governed by how it can be presented in a press release.'

‘Aren't all politicians like that? I don't mean you, darling.'

‘I'll rely on you to tell me.'

‘I wouldn't dare.'

‘But you'd tell me all the same. You can't help letting people know what you think, even if you don't mean to. I know you don't want me to stand for Parliament, but I'm afraid I'm going to, all the same.'

‘Yes, of course … What will Mrs Capstone do? About Toby and Deborah, I mean? When she finds out?'

‘Get a picture into the papers with Toby in a tantrum and Deborah all smiles. Don't worry. The love affair will have blown over before she finds out, I shouldn't wonder. I'm standing as Janet Jones, of course, and Hugo's keeping right out of it, and you and Toby are both Taskers, so she may never … What is it, darling?'

The last four words were addressed to Toby, who had whisked all the water out of the bowl, and then spread it around the lino with a J-cloth by way of mopping up. Now, soaked and earnest, he was standing by Janet's leg and beating his closed fist against her kneecap, like a gnome in a picture book rapping on an oak trunk for the resident gnome to let him in. As soon as he'd got her attention he headed for the door. They heard him rattling the gate at the foot of the stairs.

‘Bath-time, evidently,' said Janet. ‘How I look forward to the day when I can send him off to have his own bath.'

‘Oh, you're wrong! You'll find you long for the fun of bathing him.'

‘Not me, Poppy. I'm not really an earth mother inside.'

‘I must go, or Elias will be ripping the sofa to bits. Shall I ask around at the play centre and see if any of the girls would like to take on extra evenings? That would have the advantage that Toby would be used to them already.'

‘If you're sure you don't want to do it yourself. There's no great hurry—the adoption meeting's not till November—but I'd like to get it fixed. Coming, darling! Coming!'

‘Saturdays are going to be difficult.'

But Janet was already out of the door.

SEPTEMBER 1989

1

'S
cuse me asking, Mrs Tasker, but Sue says you're looking for someone to babysit Toby. Is that right?'

Laura was sitting on the bench just inside the playground gate. For once she wasn't knitting, and the way she rose the moment Poppy reached the gate made it clear she had been waiting for her to come.

‘Do you know someone?' said Poppy. ‘No, darling, you go and check the climbing frame by yourself. I want to talk to Laura. I'll be with you in a minute. Sorry, Laura. The thing is I was hoping to find one of the girls from here, because he's used to them, but of course none of them want to do Saturdays. So if you know someone reliable …'

‘I get Saturdays off.'

‘Oh. You mean you'd like to do it yourself?'

‘I wouldn't mind.'

‘But that would give you no free time at all. I mean …'

‘It's all right,' said Laura. ‘Their age, Saturday's bound to be difficult, what with them all having their young fellows to think of.'

‘What do you mean, their age?' said Poppy.

Laura stared at her, and she blushed. It's always a mistake to make jokes to deeply serious people like Laura, but Poppy realised the misunderstanding was her own fault for another reason. She had got the tone wrong, meaning it. She had been whiling away the twenty-minute ritual between park gate and the playground—duck feeding, peep-bo round the rhododendrons, twig along railings, gravel scratching and so on—with a rather successful variant on her furry-lover fantasy, in a cave on some western shore with the sun going down and reflected wave-ripple patterning the rock above. Laura's stare was not of simply surprise. It was as though she had come stumping into the cavern in full nanny uniform and found them at it. ‘Miss Poppy! How dare you! No supper for
you
!'

Did Laura herself never enjoy any version of such imaginings? Perhaps that's what being a devoted nanny did to you, funnelling your emotional drives into surrogate motherhood and suppressing what didn't fit. Laura had never done anything else, starting when she was sixteen. She was now in her early forties, at a guess, and would go on looking after other people's babies till she retired. Her current employers preferred her not to wear uniform, but she dressed as close to it as she could. It was typical that she should call Poppy Mrs Tasker, though Poppy had no idea what Laura's own surname was. The two children she looked after, Sophie and Nick, were clean, obedient and beautifully dressed. Sophie, aged almost five, could be bossy towards other children, but Nick, a pretty two-year-old with curly, near-white hair, was vulnerably clinging.

One day, perhaps, one of her appointments would stick. She might be taken on to nanny the youngest of a family with a wide age range—more likely now than it would have been a generation ago, with almost Victorian spreads being achieved through divorces and remarriages and second and third families—so that by the time that child went to prep school older siblings might well have started a new generation for Laura to take over. Then she would simply stay, the family nanny, till her retirement, and that would have been her life, and ranks of sturdy young stockbrokers would attend her funeral. Apart from the children she looked after she seemed to have no existence at all.

Laura's look, compounded by the absurdity of finding herself blushing before it, made Poppy babble.

‘It's got to be Saturdays,' she said, ‘because that's when you can find people at home. Canvassing, you know, and meeting the party workers. I'll have to talk to my daughter-in-law about it, but I'm sure … if you are, I mean. Anyway there's a bit of time still. It's not going to start till next month some time.'

‘Oh.'

Poppy heard the disappointment in Laura's voice and realised she genuinely wanted the job, needed it. It was hard to imagine why. She must be drawing a reasonable salary—her agency would have seen to that. And living in with the family she'd have almost no expenses. Perhaps there was an old mother she was helping to keep in a home somewhere. Something like that.

‘Going to help Mrs Capstone, is she?' said Laura.

‘Actually, no. Please don't pass this on. I haven't told any of the girls because I didn't want Peony telling Mrs Capstone. Toby and Deborah are such friends, you see. It might be awkward. But there's every chance my daughter-in-law will be the Labour candidate at the next election.'

The
Miss Poppy!
look was back.

‘Oh, it's all right,' said Poppy. ‘We're terribly respectable, I promise you. I've even joined the party, though I've voted Liberal all my life. As a matter of fact my daughter-in-law did it all for me first time, but we aren't all mad Militants, I promise you.'

‘There's some of them will rob you blind,' said Laura, one of those mysterious, dark, nursery warnings to which old-fashioned nannies give utterance, carrying all the force of generations of wrong knowledge. Poppy was beginning to wonder whether the convenience of having Laura to look after Toby on Saturdays would be outweighed by the resulting culture confusion inside that small skull when Nick, who had been quietly toeing one of the play-centre trikes up and down the path in front of the bench, left it with his usual and rather frequent whining whimper and ran to Laura. Poppy looked and saw Deborah coming down the path.

Poppy had been half-watching Deborah's activities while she was talking to Laura. A few yards further along the path there was a structure known as the Wendy House, cuckoo-clock-shaped, with big eaves, painted blue and yellow. It stood near the bottom of a slope in the path, down which toddlers more adventurous than Nick used to free-wheel on the trikes. Deborah had commandeered the hut, and just as each child came to a halt she was darting out like a trap-door spider, seizing the trike and stuffing it through the door.

According to Janet, Mr Capstone was some kind of mysterious middle-European entrepreneur, so perhaps this was hereditary behaviour, an attempt to corner the trike market. Peony was nowhere in sight, though it was accepted that all minders had a duty to control the anti-social drives of their charges. Deborah had successfully bullied two tots off their machines with no more than the threat of a scream, and now, with a lull in the use of the slope, was ranging further afield for prey. Poppy rose from the bench and intercepted her.

‘Hello, Deborah,' she said. ‘Have you seen Toby? Where's Toby? I've lost Toby? Where can he be?'

Deborah didn't answer her smile. Her calm blue eyes stared back in disdain at the obviousness of the subterfuge, then glanced beyond Poppy to where, by the sound of it, Laura was reassuring Nick of his rights to the tricycle. She hesitated. They'd had a really successful game of hide-and-seek round the climbing frame and in and out of the open-ended barrels only yesterday afternoon. Happy and involved, Deborah could be a perfectly reasonable, likeable child.

‘Oh, look,' said Poppy. ‘There he is!'

Deborah gave in and followed her pointing arm. Toby had finished with the climbing frame and was rolling one of the barrels along the grass. He'd put a beach-ball into the barrel, and was trying to study its movement at the same time as trundling the barrel forward, but his co-ordination wasn't up to the complexities of the posture and as Poppy watched he fell flat on his face. Deborah forgot about the tricycle and scampered across to help.

The empathy between them was extraordinary. Though both, for different reasons, had previously tended to behave as natural solitaries, there was a bond between them whose nature Poppy didn't fully understand. Perhaps Deborah recognised that Toby was somehow not in competition with her, that his interests were such as she could not dominate, nor would he want to dominate her, while she for him had the fascination of glamour and strangeness. It wasn't a unique relationship, of course—a kindergarten version of Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe—and Deborah was a very pretty little girl. It was just surprising in babies.

At any rate it took no more than a demonstration trundle or two for Deborah to grasp what Toby wanted and start pushing the barrel while he crabbed along beside it studying the rotation of the ball. They ended with a bump against the larger slide. Toby prepared to shove the barrel back along its course, to give Deborah a chance to study the phenomenon, but she had spotted an unattended tricycle. She rushed off, commandeered it and brought it back. There was a slight Chinese-puzzle element in getting it past the rim of the barrel, and though Poppy could see how it would have to go she decided to let them work it out for themselves. They were still at it when Peony appeared.

‘Hello,' said Poppy. ‘You don't look that good.' ‘Jesus, have I puked!' said Peony.

Everyone had a tan that summer, but her skin was drab grey-brown and her eyes bloodshot.

‘Have you eaten something, do you think?' said Poppy. ‘Hangover, mostly. My own fault. Shouldn't of let him talk me into trying that brandy. Lethal, that was.'

The name of Peony's Liverpool boyfriend slid conveniently into Poppy's mind.

‘You had Randy down?' she said.

‘Wasn't him. Imagine Randy eating squid? He'd die! Jesus!'

Poppy could hear the note of smugness under the groans. At least Peony had enjoyed herself the evening before, whatever she was suffering now.

‘You'd better take it easy,' she said. ‘I'll keep an eye on Deborah. She's no trouble while she's got Toby to play with.'

‘Thanks a lot, Poppy. Listen, Mrs C. says I'm to take you back to tea one of these days. Some time she's there. OK?'

‘So she can check if we're suitable playmates for Deborah?'

There was something about the idea of Mrs Capstone which made it difficult to keep the mockery out of one's voice, but Peony was in no state to notice. The children were happy for the moment with their barrel, so Poppy got out her copy of
Floodlight
and started to leaf through for language and word-processor courses, distracted by other possibilities. What openings were there, for instance, for a middle-aged, German-speaking, computer-literate dry-stone-waller in Central London? Peony dozed. The children rolled the tricycle in the barrel, and then each other, and then got in it together and wobbled it to and fro. Then they tried a variant of their yodelling game, using the barrel as a sound-box. Poppy began to listen with interest, and when Peony stirred she said, ‘Listen. Can you hear? I think Deborah's taught Toby to sing.'

‘Uh?'

‘He's not just yelling into the barrel. That's a note. Of a sort. Are the Capstones musical?'

‘Her Dad is, though it's not my idea. Stuff he'll listen to—like cats being fried alive!'

‘Don't! How are you feeling?'

‘Not so bad. What's the time? Think I'll take her home in a minute. You won't say anything to Mrs C about me having a sore head, will you? Only she might ask, see. She's like that. I don't want you to get the wrong idea—she's been ever so kind to me. She's not like they say, Poppy—really not, not at home, anyway. Mind you, he gives me the creeps.'

‘I'll give you my number, and then perhaps you or Mrs Capstone can ring me and arrange a day.'

When Peony moved to break up the game and take Deborah home. Deborah loosed a bout of screaming, the first of the afternoon, but not as piercing or prolonged as usual, and in the end she settled into her push-chair with a good grace. Toby pecked her goodbye and then meandered about for a while, eventually settling into the sandpit, where he became fascinated by the way that, as he dug, the soft sift from the edges of the hole slithered inexorably back down its sloping sides. Several of the Nafia were on the benches beside the pit, including Laura, who having through most of the summer rather pointedly set herself apart from the girls—the trained and disciplined career nanny as distinct from these unreliable fly-by-nights—had in the last couple of weeks completely changed her stance and seemed to be making a determined effort to belong. The girls, being tolerant, accepted her, as no doubt at home they were used to accepting older and slightly odd relations into their extended families. As Poppy approached she rose and came over.

‘You mustn't mind me, Mrs Tasker,' she said. ‘There's a lot of very decent people of your way of thinking. I know that.'

‘Oh, good heavens, I'm not worried if you aren't, and I'm sure Janet won't be either. I'll have a word with her tonight and we'll talk about it again tomorrow, if you're still interested.'

‘Shan't be here tomorrow, Mrs Tasker. Got to take Sophie to the dentist.'

‘Oh, Lord, is she starting already? Why must they grow up so fast?'

Laura looked at her, then at Toby sturdy and golden in the pit, then at Nick, bleach-haired, patting sand into a bucket.

‘That's the pity of it, Mrs Tasker,' she said. ‘That's just the pity of it.'

2

Next day was a return to the full blaze of summer, glare and inertia, bare brown torsos littering the grass, diversions from the usual route to the play centre in search of shade, a sense of tranquillity and well-being and thanks for such a season before winter. Almost all the children were out in the open, moving in random patterns in their bright Mothercare clothes. Poppy helped Toby inspect the climbing frame, then settled on a bench to try and work more seriously on
Floodlight
. She had only three more days to make up her mind about first choices and alternatives before the scrum and frustrations of booking in. She was distracted by Big Sue, Little Sue and Fran on the next bench. Fran was bringing the others up to date on the saga of her neighbour's domestic affairs. Fran brought her own son, Jason, to the play centre, and usually the neighbour's little girl, Winnie, as well, receiving an erratic token payment when the neighbour was in funds. The neighbour had a new man living with her, and a few weeks back her previous man—not Winnie's father—had come back and broken up her flat and given her a thrashing, the police had been called and the man arrested. Yesterday he'd appeared in court.